Word: first
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Dates: during 1980-1980
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...choices for this pantheon are, no doubt, debatable at length. Few would question the selection of a figure like Elizabeth Blackwell (1821-1910), the first accredited woman doctor in the U.S. But the writers' list includes quite unimportant figures like Vita Sackville-West and Agnes Smedley, while ignoring real heroines of literature like the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova. What has caused the real flap, however, is Chicago's relentless concentration on the pudenda...
...first view, Lonnie Wayne Burke (Griffin Dunne) is a criminal street urchin who almost seems afraid of his $2 handgun. A scruffy pressagent, Manny Alter, played with drooling opportunism by Larry Block, sees the chance to turn Lonnie into a lethal hot property. Decking the punk in a skeleton suit and dubbing him "the Halloween Killer," Manny starts Lonnie on the garish glory road to 27 murders. The tabloids swiftly pick up the scent (THE HALLOWEEN KILLER STALKS JACKIE O.). Smarmy talk-show hosts fawn on him, paperback offers and film rights proliferate, and Lonnie makes big bad bawdy whoopee...
...novel takes the form of Toomey's memoirs related in ripe old age. His first line is meant to be a grabber: "It was the afternoon of my eighty-first birthday, and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see me." The cleric wants to discuss K.M.T.'s role in the canonization of Campanati, the recently deceased "Pope Gregory XVII." Many years before in Chicago, Toomey had witnessed Campanati's miraculous healing of a child dying from meningitis...
...title has a double meaning. Doubletalk refers first to the windy Strategic Arms Limitation Talks, now approaching their twelfth year and fourth American Administration. Gerard Smith recounts numerous instances of frustration in the course of his 2½-year stint as the principal talker on the American side during the first Nixon Administration, but he also argues energetically that the negotiations have become a salutary fixture in the superpower relationship. For even when talks are stalled and not producing agreements, they serve as a safety valve for the pressures of intensifying competition and mutual misunderstanding; diplomats and generals are forced...
...Doubletalk also refers to the role in SALT I of Henry Kissinger, who conducted his own, not always parallel, negotiations with Ambassador Anatoli Dobrynin in Washington. The first volume of Kissinger's own memoirs, White House Years, published in 1979, exuded contempt for the SALT bureaucracy headed by Smith; Doubletalk retaliates with an agenda of rebuttals and countercharges. Smith, for example, accuses Kissinger of attempting "a one-man stand, a presidential aide against the resources of the Soviet leadership...